Wife is having an episode and her best friend is making it much worse
First piece of background: my wife is not formally diagnosed. She has had several manic depressive episodes, two of which involved self-harm attempts and one involved the police. Her psychiatrist considered BP2 and ultimately decided on “mood disorder” and put her on an extremely high dose of Lamictil. (The psychiatrist left private practice immediately after that and my wife is now working with a nurse practitioner for medication management, until we trying to find a new doctor.)
My wife recently began HRT with testosterone to address menopause symptoms (which may have also been Lamictil symptoms.) The hormones restarted her period and led to a really bad episode, with her screaming at me and the whole family and accusing me of having an emotional affair with a colleague. The kids are teenagers and my son is going to college in September (thank god for him) but my daughter is 16 and is crying and terribly upset with her mom. She is also depressive and anxious and my wife won’t leave the kids out of the fight, which is hurting her very badly.
My wife has a longtime friend who we’ve known since college. She’s never liked me, and I’ve always felt she was jealous of my wife. But in recent years I thought we’d come to an accommodation: I’m even godfather to her kids.
Yesterday her friend wrote me, accusing me of terribly mistreating my wife and saying she wanted to pick her up and take her out of the house (if she wasn’t recovering from surgery.) I told her she could do that if she wanted, she could try to take care of my wife through her episode because I’m so exhausted. She then told me I wasn’t a doctor and couldn’t know my wife’s diagnosis, that she wasn’t ill and I was just mistreating her (from the filtered view she receives.) I opened up and I told her about a lot of the worst stuff -- the self-harm, the hypersexuality, the rage. I told my daughter and she took my phone from me and sent this friend a voice memo explaining what it was like from her perspective.
Later as I was preparing to sleep on the couch, my wife shifted from screaming anger to “come to bed let’s make up” best friend mode. She then laughingly shared with me her friend’s texts. This friend had passed along everything I said (fair! that’s ok!) but then put the worst possible, most vicious interpretation onto it. Notably, I was “coaching my daughter to tell her lies” and she knew this because of the “long pauses” in the speech. (My daughter had been struggling not to cry.)
I don’t love this friend but I thought she cared for my wife. I thought she was a bulldog trying to protect her, maybe misunderstanding the situation, but not trying to destroy us. I now don’t think that. I think she’s actively trying to destroy our marriage and maybe hurt her friend. Or alternatively, she has such bad judgement that there’s no difference.
To conclude this long story, I told the friend everything I saw. I told her she could be friends with my wife all she wanted, but I thought what she did was irresponsible and cruel, and she’s no longer welcome in my home. I also gave her my daughter’s cell number and told her she had permission to call and speak with her directly, if she was genuinely confused about the facts in our family. (I don’t know if this is helpful or a bad idea, but I’m not manipulating my daughter and I still hold out a small amount of hope that my wife’s friend might just be confused.)
TLDR: wife’s friend entered a manic episode and made things much worse. Don’t know if this was done to hurt us or due to bad judgement, but the results are indistinguishable.